Share this:

Banquet Speech

Alexandr Solzhenitsyn's speech at the Nobel
Banquet at the City Hall in Stockholm, December 10, 1974

(Translation)

Your Majesty, Your Royal Highnesses, Ladies
and Gentlemen,

Many Nobel Prize laureates have appeared before you in this hall,
but the Swedish Academy and the Nobel Foundation have probably
never had as much bother with anyone as they have had with me. On
at least one occasion I have already been here, although not in
the flesh; once the honorable Karl Ragnar Gierow was already on
his way to meet me; and now, at last, I have arrived out of turn
to occupy an extra seat. Four years had to pass to give me the
floor for three minutes, and the secretary of the Academy is
being forced now to address the third speech to the same
writer.

I must ask your forgiveness, therefore, for
having caused all of you so much trouble, and thank you
especially for the ceremony in 1970, when your king and all of
you welcomed here an empty chair.

But you will agree that it has not been so
simple for the prizewinner, either: carrying his three-minute
speech around with him for four years. When I was preparing to
come to you in 1970 no room in my breast, no amount of paper was
sufficient to let me speak my mind on the first free tribune of
my life. For a writer from a land without liberty his first
tribune and his first speech is a speech about everything in the
world, about all the torments of his country, - and it is
pardonable if he forgets the object of the ceremony, the persons
assembled there and fills the goblets of joy with his bitterness.
But since that year when I was unable to come here, I have
learned to express openly practically all my thoughts in my own
country as well. So that finding myself expatriated to the West,
I have acquired all the better this unhindered possibility of
saying as much as I want and where I want, which is something not
always appreciated here. I needn't, therefore further burden down
this short address.

However, I find a special advantage in not
responding to the award of the Nobel Prize until four years
later. For example, in four years it is possible to experience
the role this prize has already played in your life. In my life
it has been a very large one. It has prevented me from being
crushed in the severe persecutions to which I have been
subjected. It has helped my voice to be heard in places where my
predecessors have not been heard for decades. It has helped me to
express things that would have otherwise been impossible.

In my case, the Swedish Academy have made
an exception, and a rather rare one, awarding me the prize when I
am middleaged and my open literary activity is a mere child of
some eight years. For the Academy there was a great hidden risk
in doing so: after all, only a small part of the books I had
written had been published.

But perhaps the finest task of any literary
or scientific prize lies precisely in helping to clear the road
ahead.

And I would like to express my heartfelt
gratitude to the members of the Swedish Academy for the enormous
support their choice in 1970 has given my works as a writer. I
venture to thank them on behalf of that vast unofficial Russia
which is prohibited from expressing itself aloud, which is
persecuted both for writing books and even for reading them. The
Academy have heard for this decision of theirs many reproaches
implying that such a prize has served political interests. But
these are the shouts of raucous loudmouths who know of no other
interests. We all know that an artist's work cannot be contained
within the wretched dimension of politics. For this dimension
cannot hold the whole of our life and we must not restrain our
social consciousness within in its bounds.